


Touched By God-So It Goes.

by keepcalmsmile



Series: Touched By God-So It Goes [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 13x19 Spoilers, Biblical References, Crucifixion, Gen, Messianic Sam Winchester, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Season/Series 13 Spoilers, Stigmata, Stigmatic Sam Winchester, Vonnegut references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 10:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14518932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keepcalmsmile/pseuds/keepcalmsmile
Summary: For the Oh Sam Hurt vs. Comfort Meme Prompt StigmataBy day, The Stigmatic blesses The Faithful. By night, Sam Winchester suffers.Spoilers Up To 13x19





	1. Touched By God

**Author's Note:**

> The Oh Sam Hurt vs Comfort Challenge was originally designed for someone to write either all hurt or all comfort. I wrote both...but they're in separate chapters. That counts, right?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First up: comfort.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew 11:28-30

* * *

She gets in line when it’s six-thirty in the morning and raining, thinking the wait might be shorter, then.

She’s wrong. The Faithful crowd under umbrellas, following the zigzagged lines laid out with yellow caution tape. She sees a couple police officers, nominally responsible for keeping the peace, but there’s no need. The Faithful wait patiently. Some whisper to each other. Others read the Bible, careful to keep the delicate pages safe under their umbrellas. Most scroll through their phones.

She takes notes. Tries to count the number of Faithful, identify patterns. More women than men. Lots of children too, and babies bundled in blankets. More clothes from Walmart than malls. The line moves slowly, but The Faithful are patient. They know he takes his time. They trust he’ll take his time with them.

The Faithful leave through the back of the tiny Church, so she can’t see their exultant expressions: tears flowing down their cheeks and blood streaking their faces and hair. That’s the part she looks forward to the least. She doesn’t want anyone’s blood on her. Not even a saint’s.

It’s a little after two when she finally makes it inside the tiny chapel, where she takes a number from a ticket stand, like at a deli and squeezes in one of the pews. She’d give anything for a sandwich, but at least she can sit.

Every few minutes, a man in a ridiculous trench coat calls a number and waits for the person with the ticket to stand and follow him. Often, they’ve already started trembling or crying. They say if you enter crying, you leaving laughing. If you enter laughing, you leave crying.

If she enters hungry, does that mean she’ll leave with a sandwich?

“186,” the man calls, and a mother surrounded with children stands, shepherding the children ahead of her.

She looks back down at her ticket—203—as if staring at it enough will make the number smaller.

It seems like 202—an enormous man with tattoos crawling up his arms—takes longer than 195 to 200 combined. Then, finally, the trench-coated man reemerges.

“203.”

“Thank God,” she says without any reverence. A few people glare at her, but the trench-coated man quirks his eyebrows as if he were amused.

“Sam would like to spend a great deal of time with every one of you,” the trench-coated man says as he leads her down a narrow hallway. The wooden sign on the door in front of them says, “Sanctuary.”

“Sam?”

“We don’t all call him The Stigmatic. He can spend five minutes with you. Dean will be keeping time.”

Dean, the mysterious, frightening figure that always stands at the Stigmatic’s side. Many people believe they’re brothers. She bets they’re lovers.

The trench-coated man takes her phone with a promise to give it back to her when she leaves then puts his hand on the doorknob, “Do you faint at the sight of blood?”

“Why would I come here if I did?”

“All sorts of people come here. Usually those who faint don’t do so with him, but we still like to check.”

He doesn’t say anything else, just pulls the door open and ushers her inside. She barely notices it shut behind her.

She had no idea how to a picture a man who bleeds like Jesus and spends his days comforting the faithful or, increasingly, the unfaithful, but she hadn’t expected sweatpants.

That seems to be all The Stigmatic’s wearing. He sits on a small, vinyl-covered cushion. The floor is covered in a clear, plastic tarp. The walls are white, and whatever icons or alters might have been there before are gone now, with the exception of a large wooden cross that hangs on the wall behind The Stigmatic. Just in case anyone had waited all day to see this guy but didn’t know what the wounds represented. A man stands behind and slightly to the left of The Stigmatic. He’s dressed in jeans and flannel, like a farmer or a rancher, and his arms are crossed tight across his chest. He glares at her, as if he kind of wishes she were dead.

She forces herself to look at The Stigmatic.

Her first thought is that if God really did this to him, then He’s a dick. Blood drips sluggishly from his hands and feet and gathers in tiny pools on the tarp, like water from a leaking pipe. There’s a dark, ugly gash under the left side of his ribs, and tiny red pinpricks dot his brow. He even has long hair, but thankfully no beard. 

The room doesn’t smell of blood. It smells of wine and roses.

“Hello,” The Stigmatic smiles, and her breath catches.

He smiles exactly like her grandpa did when he could lift her onto his shoulders and sneak her M&Ms from the tallest shelf on his bookcase. It’s wide and kind, and her first instinct is to wrap her arms around him and bury her face in his shoulder, like she had so often with Grandpa.

“You can sit, if you want,” he says, gesturing with one bloody palm to a vinyl cushion just outside the furthest of the blood puddles.

She does and finds herself smiling back at him. It doesn’t seem strange anymore to sit in a tiny room in a tiny Church in nowhere, Kansas talking to a man who bleeds like Christ.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Maddie.”

He nods, “Hi Maddie. I’m Sam, and you have some questions for me.”

“What kind of questions,” Dean says. She jumps. She’d forgotten he was there.   

“She’s a reporter from Cloud County Community College’s school paper.”

“No reporters!” Dean glares at her again, and this time Maddie’s sure he wants to kill her, “That’s the one rule, Sam.”

“Dean. It’s Cloud County Community College.”

“Not if she sells it to CNN or something.”

“CNN won’t buy the story from her. They’ll think she made it up. Sorry,” he adds, looking back at her, “That’s the truth, though.”

“How do you know what college I go to?”

“It’s either through trickery or divine intervention, whichever you prefer.”

“That’s not how the truth works.”

The Stigmatic shrugs, “Maybe. I'm happy to discuss the philosophical meaning of Truth, if that's what you want.”

It’s not. There’s a list of questions she’s memorized, carefully designed to give her as much information as possible without revealing herself as a reporter.

So much for that.

“Why do you do this?” she asks, gesturing at the door behind her, “For hours and hours every day.”

The Stigmatic smiles again, and she can smell her grandpa’s house, can nearly hear his off-tune singing and playful banter with his dog.

“It comforts people. I don’t think much about how it works.”

“Like how you’re reminding me of my grandpa.”

The Stigmatic nods, “Like that.”

“I haven’t talked about him in years,” and this is not what she came here to say, but she can’t stop herself, “He died when I was fifteen, but my Mom left long before that, and my Dad was either at work or at the bar, so it was always just me and Grandpa. He taught me to read and to ride my bike and how to eat sweet corn straight of the cob and I . . .” she swallows a sob, “I _miss him_.”

“You love him very much,” The Stigmatic says, “And he loves you. That will stay with you forever.”

She usually hates it when people say sappy shit like that, but this time she smiles, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” The Stigmatic raises his hands, “Do you want me to bless you?”

“I don’t believe in God.”

The Stigmatic laughs, and damn if that doesn’t remind her of Grandpa laughing as she dances in the kitchen.

“This isn’t about God, it’s about comfort. Will a blessing comfort you?”

“Yes,” she says, even though she’s pretty sure that means she’s crazy.

“Bow your head,” he says. She does, and he rests his hands on her head and begins speaking in a language she doesn’t recognize.

She spends half a second trying to figure out what language he’s using, but then it doesn’t matter anymore because she’s in heaven. She’s in heaven and Grandpa’s there: spinning her in circles, kissing her scrapped knees, dishing her ice cream for breakfast, sitting on the big swing in the lawn as she worried about school, Dad, Mom, acne, not liking boys, liking girls, and oh God what was Dad going to say to that? He would kiss her forehead and tell her not to worry because she had him, and they’d figure it all out.

The Stigmatic lifts his hands, and she looks up at him with tear-filled eyes.

“Be at peace,” he says, “Your Grandpa’s still with you. Now go write your newspaper article.”

The trench-coat man opens the door and points her to the exit. She gives him a huge smile, which he returns with a nod.

She never cared about religion, thought praying pretty much meant talking to yourself, but she couldn’t deny it now.

She’d met a man touched by God.


	2. So It Goes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And now for the hurt.

Billy had an extremely gruesome crucifix hanging on the wall of his little bedroom in Ilium. A military surgeon would have admired the clinical fidelity of the artist's rendition of all Christ's wounds-the spear wound, the thorn wounds, the holes that were made by the iron spikes. Billy's Christ died horribly. He was pitiful.

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse _5_

* * *

 

It’s well past seven at night when Dean finally convinces Sam to end his saint routine for the day and go home.

He gets it. He does. Sam needs to feel like he’s making a difference. Like whatever shit he’s going through means something. Even if he has to lie to himself.

Sam’s always been an “ends justify the means” guy, and sometimes that leads to things like Ruby and the apocalypse, but sometimes it leads to sitting on a cushion for hours every day healing the masses, no matter the agony it causes him.

Dean knows Sam thinks he deserves it, that his pain is worth the comfort he brings to others. Everyone who gives half a crap about Sam knows that’s bullshit.

When a stranger comes in, seeking solace after loss, strength in the face of fear, or assurance of good things to come, they see The Stigmatic. The holy man touched by God who knows their hearts and thoughts; whose smile reminds them of their loved ones; whose blessings return them to their happiest memories or give them hope for better ones. The Stigmatic smells not of blood, but of sanctity.

Anyone who sees Sam as more than a heavenly aphrodisiac sees the truth. They see Sam’s hollow cheeks, the way his sweatpants barely cling to his bony hips. They see the sweat mixing with the blood on his brow, the way he constantly trembles, how he often pauses mid-sentence, mid-word, because he’s in too much pain to speak. 

Sam does not smell of wine or roses or Jesus or whatever the fuck else people say. He smells of blood.

“Okay Sammy,” Dean says after he’s bandaged all his brother’s wounds (and seriously, how sick is it to want someone’s blood wiped all over you), “Mom’s got the car waiting out back. Let’s get gone.”

Sam nods and closes his eyes, steeling himself for when Dean pulls him up and into his arms, bridal style, avoiding the whiplashes across his back the best he can.

Having holes in your hands and feet cripples you. Most people don’t notice that either.

Cas comes in with a wheel chair, and Dean sits Sam in it. No matter how careful he is, Sam needs to take several long, slow breaths until the pain recedes to manageable levels. Dean grips the handles of the chair and pushes Sam out of the sanctuary and down the handicapped ramp in the back of the Church. Some volunteer cleans up the mess. Dean doesn’t give a shit who. They probably see it as a sacred honor.

Sam’s already half-gone by the time they reach the Impala. Mom’s got it parked horizontal to the sidewalk so that the passenger side door is just an inch away from the concrete. Sometimes they can move Sam quickly and painlessly enough that they don’t wake him, but today his eyes snap open the second Dean touches him, and he flinches away. Sam doesn’t mean it. He’s just disoriented and doesn’t want anything pressing against his wounds. It still fucking hurts.

 

It’s a ten minute drive from the Church to the one-story ranch house they’ve been living in the past six months. Since Sam’s awake, Mom spends the time forcing conversation about Sam’s day, about the people he met, the blessings he gave.

She rolls her eyes when Sam says he let a reporter from a community college interview him, “Bet that didn’t make Dean happy.”

“It did not,” Dean feigns anger to get a smile out of Sam. It half works.

Sam doesn’t ask about Mom’s day. They all know how it went. Getting things at the house ready for the next time Sam came home and finding a cure to the curse.

Another cure. They’ve always known the easiest solution.

There’s another transition from the car to the wheelchair. This time, Sam whimpers at the movement, and Dean really, really wants to shoot something.

A ramp covers the stairs up to the house. Mom holds the door open for them, and Dean pushes Sam inside.

“Bath today?”

Sam shakes his head, “Just need to piss.”

Sam hasn’t had a bath in four days. His hair sticks together in greasy locks, with some blood mixed in for good measure. The Faithful don’t notice, and the rest of them have bigger things to worry about. Dean will probably force the issue tomorrow. He thinks baths make Sam feel a bit better. He tells himself that, anyway.

So Dean just wheels Sam into the bathroom, pulls his sweatpants off, and sits him on the toilet. Sam pisses a little, head buried in Dean’s neck as he does, forcing Dean to lean over the toilet in a way that would feel awkward if he hadn’t done it every day for the past six months.

When Sam’s done, Dean sits him back in the chair and pulls another pair of sweatpants out from the bathroom cabinet. Sam’s drifting off again. He doesn’t look peaceful.

“Stay awake, little brother,” Dean says, “You still gotta eat.”

Sam groans dramatically, “Jerk.”

Dean forces himself to smile, “Bitch.”

Sam’s bedroom is right across the bathroom. It’s typically Sam: a large bed, a night stand with an ugly lamp, a TV mounted across from him. Nothing on the walls. There’s a leather recliner on the side of the bed without the night stand. 

Dean pulls the covers back and lays Sam in the bed, propped against a mountain of pillows. The mattress is ridiculously expensive, so are the pillows, blankets, and sheets, but they’re soft enough to keep Sam comfortable.

There’s a knock on the door, “Hello, Samuel.”

Sam turns his head and grins, “Rowena. I didn’t know you were here.”

“I was on my way to Chicago. Thought I’d stop by for a few days, and I brought dinner.” She has one of those large plastic cups with a lid and a straw in her hand. It’s filled with pinkish liquid, “How does tropical sound?”

Sam won’t let anyone spoon-feed him, which means his diet consists entirely of smoothies, protein drinks, and the occasional milkshake. They pack them with as many protein and vitamin powders as they can while still keeping the things edible. It sort of works. Sam can usually balance a large cup between his hands and use a straw. The days he can’t, he refuses to eat. On those days, Sam points out he probably can’t starve to death, so it doesn’t really matter. Anyone there always tells him to shut up.

Dean stands, “Well, now that you’ve got the wicked witch of the east to keep you company, I’m gonna grab some chow.”

Rowena visits every few weeks, and Sam always likes to spend time with her alone. Dean was a little bitter at first. Now he’s just relieved to have a couple hours without his brother's blood strewn across his hands.

Mom orders Chinese, and they lean against the kitchen counters, silently passing the cartons of chicken and rice, along with a bottle of whiskey between each other. Dean eats both of the cookies without looking at the fortunes. They’ll make him want to shoot something again. They don’t talk about the progress Mom didn’t make finding a cure. They all know it’s a useless search. They know how to end this, but Sam refuses. When they’re done, they sit in the living room and watch something on an enormous TV. Dean doesn’t register what it is. Maybe a sitcom.

Rowena bought the house and everything in it. The days she’s not visiting Sam she spends traveling the world, also searching for another cure.

For now, they can hear Rowena’s voice from down the hall. She’s probably reading Sam a geeky book about the history of the microwave or something. Dean reads to him too. Novels mostly. Crappy thrillers. The occasional fantasy novel when Dean’s feeling generous. He and Mom switch off reading Vonnegut.

After an hour or so, Mom leaves to visit Sam and then goes to bed. Dean spends a little more time with the TV and his whiskey, but he doesn’t get drunk enough that he’d worry about accidentally dropping Sam. They’re pretty sure Sam can’t die, but he can still break bones, and that would be a whole new clusterfuck. Dean wonders if the Faithful would notice if their Savior had a broken leg, or if the curse would hide it from them, just like it hides the trembling, whimpering, and stench of blood.

A little after one, Dean finally shuts off the TV and stops by Sam’s room, stands in the doorway and watches. Rowena’s holding Sam’s hand in hers, barely brushing the top of the bandage with her thumb.

She’s got a gun in her lap packed with witch killing bullets and tears in her eyes.

“Just do it, Sam,” she whispers, “Please.”

Sam’s eyes are barely open, but he shakes his head.

“It’s my fate. You know that.”

“Fates change,” he breathes.

Rowena slips the gun in her purse and kisses Sam’s hand. A tear falls on the mattress.

The Faithful call Sam The Stigmatic. They think his blood, his wisdom, his blessings are gifts from God.

They’re actually curses from the devil as he died.

Dean can’t watch anymore, so he leaves and lets the cure to Sam’s suffering keep vigil through the night.

So it goes.


End file.
